


In the Quiet After

by Graverobber



Category: Midnight Special (2016)
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 06:09:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6644425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graverobber/pseuds/Graverobber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterwards, they find each other. It takes a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Quiet After

Afterwards, they find each other. It takes a while. 

They keep Lucas in Beaumont State Penitentiary for eight months, in the end. He thought it would be longer. He thought perhaps they’d never let him out at all. He never asked why they let a man who shot a state trooper and abducted a minor over state lines go free. He hadn't much been in the mood to ask questions. 

Probably it had something to do with the three different shrinks who declared him sane after all. After everything. Probably it had something to do with the letter he got from the trooper, all confusion and forgiveness and bewilderment mixed in together, rambling about the structures he saw appear from his hospital bed and the shadowy figures gliding through his room, intent on other business. He doesn’t want to press charges on a fellow trooper. He’s going back to work. He wants to move on. 

Probably it was Sevier, in the end. Technically he’s out as a part of a complicated plea bid, some political arrangement the NSA have manufactured with him thrown in on the side. They’ll be relieved to see the back of him. He’s an unofficial embarrassment, a madman who refuses to play crazy. 

On the day of his release he collects his brown paper parcel from the front desk. Watch, scratched up old neck chain, billfold, wallet. A pair of work gloves, bloodstained. A stray Lego he doesn’t remember picking up from Sarah’s house. He stuffs everything into his pants pocket without looking. 

When he steps outside, Sevier is waiting for him, leaning on the hood of his boring black agency-issued sedan. ‘Need a ride?’ he asks. He’s wearing the same beat up tweed jacket that Lucas remembers from – it must be dozen of sessions, interrogations that all now blur into one because there’s only so many different questions you can ask when you aren't getting any answers. Sevier never seemed to tire of asking them, never got impatient, just kept gnawing on it, over and over, like Lucas would suddenly come up with answers if he just kept going long enough. Minus the car, he looks like any other earnest grad student, like he took a wrong turn out of the A&M San Antonio campus and wound up outside a Supermax facility by mistake. 

‘You need a ride somewhere?’ he asks again, like a man who hasn't just spent eight solid months asking him different questions, asking him how Sarah and Alton had disappeared through a net of inter-agency surveillance, what the light in Alton’s eyes had looked like, what he’d seen in it. How it had felt. 

‘Got a bus ticket’ said Lucas. Sevier wants something Lucas can’t give him. Other people saw the towering arches, the pristine unfurling mega-sails and felt fear, disbelief, awe. Sevier felt hunger. Sevier wants to know everything. Sevier want to see again. Lucas can’t help Sevier. 

‘Where are you headed?’ asks Sevier, almost exactly like a man who didn't know. 

‘Chicago’ said Lucas. ‘Got an Aunt up there to stay with during parole.’

The word parole suggests that after a while they’ll stop watching him. What is waiting for Lucas in Chicago is not parole, and they both know it.

‘Cold winters up there’ says Sevier. 

‘Yep’ said Lucas, and turns away down the road that will get him to the bus station. He doesn’t look back. 

In the line for the Chicago express he gives his ticket to an old lady who thanks him profusely. He gives her a hand with her bags as well, wedging them safely in the overhead bins and slipping off the back of the bus just before the driver pulls away. He watches from behind a luggage rack until the black sedan that has been idling by the kerb for 20 minutes pulls away. 

He already pawned his watch in the little cheque cashing place down the street. The wallet he leaves in the men’s bathroom of the bus station, just before the overnight to Tucson is due to leave. Perhaps the activity on his credit cards will keep the police guessing for a while.

The chain he flips below the stretched out neck of his sweatshirt. The Lego stays in his pocket. He keeps the work gloves tucked into his waistband. You don’t throw away a good pair of work gloves, well worn in. It’s only his own blood.

Arizona is kind of what he expected. Hot, red sandy earth. Dry everywhere, gritty. Big sky. He finds Sarah in the town that she had named in the car all that time ago. She doesn’t suit being brunette, but he likes how the shorter hair looks on her. Perhaps it’s a relief not to have her head dragged down by that heavy plait. He wonders briefly why she didn't cut it when she first left the Ranch. Not the kind of thing he can ask.

The family she’s staying with got out ten years ago, before Alton was even born. One of their boys had epilepsy, talked during his fits, nonsense words. The other walked in his sleep a lot, seemed to know where he was going with his eyes closed. They don’t say why the Reverend wanted the girl. In the pictures she’s really pretty. Lucas turns away. Just another family fleeing the Ranch before their kids were taken from them. Sarah heard about them in the years after she’d left, about they’d helped other ex-congregation members. As much as they can trust anyone, they can trust them. 

The family are cautiously welcoming. They've heard the rumours, seen the TV reports, but they were too far out to get a view of the Other Place. The pictures are all over the internet, but no one ever put Alton together with the blast, and he’s not about to help them join the dots. Sarah’s just another woman running from the place that took her son, and that’s good enough for them.

He spends the first week sleeping on their too-short couch. Sarah’s in a little room at the back. She’s babysitting neighbourhood kids and doing odd jobs to keep up her end of the housekeeping, but they need something more permanent than that. He finds a little house on the other side of town, a two bed bungalow. It’s run down and dingy, but it’s set back from the road, surrounded by a rambling, overgrown lot. Defensible.

When he tells Sarah he’s found a place, the only thing she says is ‘When do we leave?’ For the first time since they hauled him out of that upturned car, half dead in handcuffs, Lucas feels like himself. 

It takes him longer to fix a job. He could pick up casual work off the books, but it’s better to contact some of the names he remembers from the old days. Never mind that back then he was looking at them from the other side of the law. He sets himself and Sarah up with new social security numbers, new IDs. It’s cheaper to take the driving test again than get a fake licence. He fails the first time. Too fast on the corners, the guy from the DMV says curtly, and there’s nothing he can do. In his Texas apartment he used to keep his DPS tactical driving certificates, mandatory for all troopers, in a box under his bed. His landlady must have thrown it out by now. Probably the NSA went through his stuff for evidence before they let her burn it, or take it all to Goodwill. 

He forces himself to take it easy on the second test. When he comes back to the house, certificate in hand, Sarah half smiles when she sets down his dinner plate. 

For the first couple of months, he’s exhausted. He can turn his hand to most things but construction takes on guys without asking too many questions, as long as they can keep up with the work. It’s hard. He was active before and he looked after himself, but work was a lot of sitting in patrol cars and he’s had eight months to go to seed in a 6’ by 9’ cell. The muscles in his stomach and thighs are hell for weeks, and his shoulders are one solid knotted ache after hours of hefting rubble into the back of a truck or shifting sheetrock. He goes to bed straight after dinner, spends his days off drooping around the house, napping and dozily trying to straighten the place up. It’s a dump, really. None of the doors close properly and the plumbing is constantly on the frizz. 

Sarah never complains. They don’t talk much in those first few months. They don’t see each other much, really. He works weird shifts and she’s been taken on as a cashier in a mini-mart, working a lot of weekends and evenings. She leaves him plates to heat up in the oven, slightly gristly meatloaf and overcooked chicken stew. She’s not a great cook, but it’s hot and it keeps him going. They don’t talk about Alton. They don’t talk about Roy. 

She stands behind him one night as he’s eating dinner, rolling his neck to ease it between mouthfuls. Her small hands on his shoulders are a shock. 

‘Hold still’ she says and does something with the balls of her thumbs on his deltoid muscle which drags a startled groan from his mouth. Embarrassed, he tries to pull away but she just says it again, quiet and firm, and moves to his other side. By the end of it he’s so relaxed he doesn’t even notice her leave. He’s more than half way to sleeping on the table top by his half empty plate, truth be told. 

After that she rubs his shoulders pretty often, but never when he expects it. She doesn’t like him to see her approaching, he realises. He just feels her hands on him, over his work shirt, and he knows better than to speak. He tries not to make sounds. It’s been a long time since he was touched for anything but necessity. Or violence, sometimes, before he’d earned his place in the Beaumont pecking order and was left respectfully alone, mostly. They never found out he was a state trooper, which was just as well. 

Things settle down. He toughens up, hard muscle layering in where he needs it. His hands callous, nails torn down to the beds and thick layers of skin forming at the base of his fingers and the joints. He’s not so tired, he’s awake more in the evenings. He tries to work out his shifts so he’s around more when Sarah’s not at work. He worries about her. She doesn't sleep much. He hears her moving around in her room at night, drawers opening and shutting. He sleeps badly himself, too tired not to drop off and too wired not to jerk awake five times a night, listening for the NSA’s sedans, for the minivans of the Ranch to draw up outside. 

He finds her up at sunrise more than one morning, sitting on the back porch and watching for the first slip of the big desert sun on the horizon. Once he walks up to her, puts a hand on her bare shoulder, and she startles. 

‘Sorry’ he says. ‘Should have said something.’ 

When she comes to his bed a few nights later it’s not a surprise. He doesn't think it’s the sex. Sex is just a way to have someone else's skin close to yours for a little while. Afterwards they can lie together, close, and not talk. Mostly she just comes to his room, takes her nightdress off and sleeps curled around him. He doesn't mind. If this is what she needs from him he can give it. He was used to going long stretches without, even before. He was solitary by choice. He remembers her reunion with Roy, the way they stayed apart. The careful way he touched her hand, embraced her, that one time.

They don’t talk about it. It’s just human contact, he knows that. Skin hunger. Sometimes he catches her looking at him, like in that morning at her house back out East. Any other woman, he would think she was eyeing him up, but with Sarah it’s more like she’s trying to work something out. He isn't about to help her with that. She tells him little bits of how she ended up at the Ranch, how her parents were some of the first Congregation. He tells her about work, mostly, what the guys in his team get up to when the supervisor’s back is turned. He misses his squad like a weight on his chest. His uniform, his badge, his gun. 

On Sundays they can sometimes hear the electronic bells of the Baptist church four blocks south. If she ever prays now, he never sees her. 

He doesn't pray, but that’s not new. Sometimes, on nights when he’s alone and waiting for the scrunch of tyres on gravel outside, he tries to hold Alton in his mind. Kids can be difficult to picture. They get broken down to a blur of skinny legs and crooked milk teeth. But Alton he can see pin sharp, haloed by the setting sun in the Delta hotel room and telling them impossible things. Dorky bowl cut, steady eyes. 

Roy is harder to find. He’s the same skinny kid, too close to Alton to separate them sometimes. He’s the gawky teenager, too tall and stooping to hide it. A flash of blue eyes under heavy lids, the twist of lips in a quick and secret smile. The picture flips to 20 years later, the solid man with a face like a boxer’s, wary. The cut up version they dragged out from that ruined car. Neither of them saw the Other Place, unconscious against the felting of the roof. Roy hadn't struggled against the cuffs but he had shouted, roared for Sarah and Alton, for Lucas too. Roy was a quiet person, mostly. Always had been. 

There are too many versions of Roy all overlapping in his mind, and Lucas feels like he didn't get enough time with any of them. 

It’s a life. They go to work and come back. He fixes up the house, slowly. Her cooking doesn't get much better. She comes into his room most nights and they lie together and his heart slows down and he can feel his shoulders uncurl, and he can stop listening out for the tyres, for the click of guns being loaded. Sometimes she’ll wake him in the middle of the night, when it hurts the most, he supposes. He tries to make it good, to make her forget. He tries to do it with his whole heart so he can forget as well, for a while. 

In the evenings they sit in the living room. Back in Texas he had a flat screen TV and a gaming console, but he can’t imagine watching TV with Sarah. Even with her hair cut short, even in jeans and a collared blouse, she seems like she belongs in another time. They take books out of the library. They have a pretty good graphic novel section. Sarah reads biographies, mainly. They listen to the radio, NPR and the oldie stations. Weirdly, she seems to like classic rock. He catches her bopping round the kitchen once, to ‘Boys of Summer’. He leaves before she sees him, but he comes back to the memory every once in a while, when she’s still again, and sad and quiet. 

When Roy comes back it’s October. He’s been gone two years. 

He looks the same, mostly. Older again, deeper creases in his face, dark bruised flesh under his eyes. He was released four months ago in Illinois, it turns out, though he didn't know it until they let him go. He’s been making his way here ever since, stopping and starting and doubling back. He looks like he hasn't slept since they took him. 

Lucas is in the back yard when he arrives, hacking away at the underbrush, and when he walks back up to the house, scratched up and sweating, he finds them standing at the bottom of the porch steps staring at each other. He never saw how Sarah greeted him. Did they kiss, he wonders afterwards? Did she put her arms around him?

Now she turns at the sound of his footsteps and says ‘Look who’s here’ and there’s a smile in her voice that he barely recognises. Perhaps if he had been able to see her face when she danced around the kitchen, she would have looked like she does now. 

‘Good to see you man’ he says now, because that’s the whole truth. It’s good to see him here, in this place. He waits carefully for Roy to move forward, to hold out his arms, but he’s not surprised when he doesn't. He holds out his hand instead, a safe half step away, and when Roy takes it without hesitation he risks a clasp on the opposite arm. He’s too thin, but he’s there. 

‘Good to see you too, buddy’ Roy says, and somehow they've got out of the worst of it and they can all go inside. 

Roy needs a shower pretty badly, and they fix up some food while he’s in there, bread and cheese and warmed over meatloaf. Sarah won’t meet his eyes. ‘You don’t have to worry’ he says quietly. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’ But she won’t look at him and Roy’s back before they've even finished with the food. 

‘I missed your cooking’ Roy says to Sarah. 

‘Must have been pretty bad in there’ she says, and she’s aiming for light but she doesn't quite make it. 

‘Pretty bad’ is all he says, with that twist of his mouth that’s not quite a smile. ‘This looks good though.’ 

He doesn't say much else. They were looking for something in him, inside him, something that was like Alton. They looked for a long time. They couldn't find it. They let him go. That’s it. 

Roy falls asleep on the sofa and it seems wrong to wake him up. They cover him with a sheet and go to their rooms silently. Sarah still won’t look at him.

In the morning he rolls over and finds Roy looking down at him. He’s wearing jeans and an undershirt. He’s holding out a mug. 

‘Morning’ Lucas says, rubbing grit from his eye. 

‘Morning’ says Roy. ‘Want this?’ Lucas does want it, but he’s distracted by the marks on Roy’s wrist, toughened dull red calloused ridges. Lucas knows what they are, bets silently on identical ones covered by the cuffs of his jeans. You saw them on prisoners who’d been shackled a lot. High risk. Permanent solitary. Roy sets the coffee down on the bedside table and Lucas finds his arm has drifted over by itself, fingertip barely stroking over the mark. 

He’s still groggy, not properly awake, but it doesn't really explain how one minute he’s propped up on one elbow in bed and the next Roy has got him standing, crowded hard up against the wall, one arm tight across his neck. Lucas forgot how much taller he is. Roy is breathing hard in his ear, almost panting, and Lucas knows how this goes. PTSD. God knows what they were doing to him in that place, shut up for months. He makes himself go pliable against him, forces himself to breathe slow like you would do to quiet an animal. He waits for Roy to punch him or let him go. 

Roy kisses him, nose and teeth and tongue all landing hard and he can’t catch his thoughts or his breath. Roy has a hand on him, the one not laid across his windpipe, and he’s fifteen again and they’re rutting up against the wall behind the 7-11 after hours, desperate and hungry for it, angry for the time it takes. He gets a hand on Roy after a while, just shoves past the too-big jeans, too big because they’re his and Roy is thinner now and Roy feels just the same after all this time, and he opens up to him, just rides it out, uses his hand as best he can and puts everything he has into the kiss, and doesn't think. 

When he can open his eyes again, Roy’s staring at him. Not much of anything in his face. He pulls his arm down, steps back, turns away and out of the room. Lucas can still feel the arm across his neck like a ghost, like a shadow. 

Lucas goes to work. He can’t think of anything else to do. He takes the overtime they offer him and when he staggers home it’s already dark and they’re eating dinner at the table. The sidelights are off and the overhead shade is lit up warm and yellow. ‘Roy made dinner’ says Sarah. She’s wearing her blue chambray shirt, the one with tiny rosebuds in the print. She’s not one for frills but she found it at Goodwill and it’s her favourite. She’s beautiful.

‘Just chicken pot pie’ says Roy. ‘You want cornbread?’

It’s the best thing he’s ever tasted, it’s amazing. He didn't know what he meant to do when he got back to the house – pack his stuff, throw a fit, tell them both everything, kiss Roy, kiss Sarah – but instead he sits at the table and eats what he’s been given. ‘It’s good’ he tells Roy, and Sarah smiles like he’s done something right. 

So he stays. He’s bracing himself to see them together – holding hands in the backyard, perhaps, folded together on the couch. He wonders perhaps if they hold off when he’s around, if they’re self-conscious. He wonders if one of them is holding over some guilt about him, pointless. He wants to tell them they don’t need to feel bad, that he always knew what it was for both of them. But he can’t see how to talk about any of it, so he stays silent. They’re polite and calm with each other. When they sit together on the couch, work in the back yard, share the dishes in the kitchen, he can see the distance between them. That blank space used to be Alton. Roy sleeps on the couch every night, folds his blanket up every morning and lays it over the arm. Sarah never rubs his back after work now. Roy doesn't try to touch him again. 

Lucas waits, and watches, and catches how they look at each other when the other one can’t see. His chest aches with it. He considers what he knows about the Ranch. He thinks of the photos he’s seen of the congregation, long homespun dresses buttoned to the throat, old fashioned shirts and vests. The long hard physical work, the segregation of men and women, the absolute rule of the Reverend who took what he wanted so other people couldn't have it. Roy was 15 when his parents took him away from Lucas. Sarah spent her whole life there. She’s been outside less than four years, mostly alone. Roy made it ten days before they caught him. They lost a kid. 

Lucas looks at them eating breakfast silently together, and realises they can’t do it on their own. 

He starts slow. He makes himself talk more. He’s not chatty by nature, but at dinner, in the evenings when they’re sitting out on the back porch, working on the yard at the weekends, he tries. He talks about stupid stuff, work gossip and the crazy old lady across the way who walks her tortoise at the end of a string in the mornings and weird stories the squad used to tell in the bar. Little things from when he and Roy were kids. Nothing big, nothing important. 

It works, kind of. Sarah tells them about the people who come into the Mini Mart, the stories the high school kids who work the registers tell her when it’s quiet. They all seem to have multiple boyfriends and girlfriends and they’re constantly swapping between them and their social life is mainly played out in the parking lot after hours. Skateboarding is still a thing, Lucas notes. He can’t imagine Alton on a skateboard. 

Roy is still quiet. But he talks a little bit about his work. He’s helping out at a garage a couple of blocks away. They seem to like him. He scoffs at the women who come in not knowing how to change their own oil and making him crazy. Privately, Lucas thinks there’s other reasons they come back so often. He’s seen what Roy looks like in oil stained overalls, twisting a rag between his fingers. He keeps his thoughts to himself. 

So now they’re talking. He starts taking them out. Nothing fancy, just to town on a Saturday to run errands. They might get coffee at the diner. Once they turn into the park to see the funfair setting up. That was a mistake. Too many kids, and Sarah got upset and Roy just walked them right out of there. But later that night he sees Roy touch her hand while they’re doing the dishes, so maybe that’s some of what they need after all.

So he tries to talk about Alton a little. Not directly at first. He asks Sarah about the Other Place. They missed it all, upside down in that dumb car, he says. So she tells them about the white sails and the soaring spirals and everything moving gently in the wind like ships, like flowers, like secrets opening in front of your eyes. Hanging green stuff that fluttered, just slightly, and everywhere these bridges, smooth and soaring, hundreds of feet off the ground and connecting everything. Lucas likes the sound of those bridges. 

One morning, early, he comes on them sitting together on the back porch, not touching but close. They like sunrise and sunset times out there best, he’s realised. She’s telling him about Alton, how he went. It’s family stuff, but he keeps standing there. He figures they won’t mind if he listens too. 

Things are better after that, easier. But Roy’s still on the sofa. Lucas never sees them touch. 

So. He forces himself to tap Roy on the shoulder to get his attention. To tuck Sarah’s tag back in, fingertips just brushing the impossibly soft skin at the back of her neck. When he puts a hand on her waist to pass by her in the kitchen, she looks up at him, startled. Roy frowns a little when he claps him on the shoulder as they stand looking in satisfaction at the rotten tree they just brought down in the back yard.

It’s hard. He has to work at it to keep everything light, easy. To touch them when the other one is around to see it, to put it out in the open. To not let too much show on his face. 

He’s not really sure if it’s working. But they need this. When Roy first came back to him, twenty years late with a tired face and a grown body and an eight year old in swimming goggles hooked over his arm, Lucas hadn't stopped to think. Hadn't needed to. Roy needed him then, and Roy and Sarah need him now. They just don’t know how to ask. 

So they go on. The boss at work puts him heading up a scaffolding crew. He’s good at it, it takes planning, steady effort. He slings an arm around Roy while they watch the firework display at New Year’s. Roy’s boss has put him to stripping an old British Triumph motorcycle down to the blocks and building it back up again. Roy looks like he’s in love. Lucas tries not to think about that. He kisses Sarah on the cheek instead, on her birthday. Her hair is growing out light again, beautiful, and she blushes when he hands her flowers. She’s talking about going back to night school to get her GED. 

He figures now he just has to wait. He spends as much time as he can out back, clearing weeks and saplings and underbrush. Perhaps Sarah would like a pond out here someday. Or a vegetable patch. She should have the space to do whatever she wants.

He’s stopped touching them now. He watches them instead, from the back window as they sit watching sunrises, sunsets. He makes plans. They might decide to have another kid, he thinks. They might risk whatever strange alchemy brought Alton to them and took him away again so soon. They’ll need his room, but he can stay in the neighbourhood. Perhaps he can babysit sometimes. Uncle Lucas. 

Outside Roy and Sarah are murmuring to each other, heads close together. He realises he’s been staring too long. He goes to bed and stares at the ceiling instead, listens for tyres and guns outside so that he doesn't have to know if it was one set of footsteps or two heading into Sarah’s room. He wants a drink more than he has in months. 

He realises he’s waiting for them to ask him to leave. Maybe they’ll just let him catch them necking in the kitchen and draw his own conclusions. It’ll be the beginning of the end, he thinks, but that’s got to be better that the waiting. 

He finds himself thinking of Sevier more these days, wondering what he’s doing. Did he get a new case? Or perhaps he got out altogether, left the agency and met a nice girl. He could get his postgrad after all, become one of those perpetual students hanging around campus or an adjunct professor in some small college town where his dorky glasses and elbow patches might fit in after all. 

He knows that none of that is true, though. Sevier is probably in a basement somewhere, rereading files for hours every day and wondering what he missed. Sevier isn't the type of person to let things go. 

The tension of waiting is getting to him. He takes on more overtime to be out of the house, patches in on different crews. One day he spends 11 hours breaking concrete and by the time he punches out his hands and arms are numb with the vibration of the drill and it’s not until he gets home that he notices he’s hurt. He thinks it’s just a pulled muscle at first, but it doesn't get any better. The spot under his shoulder blade feels hot and cold and sort of fizzy, sometimes, in a deeply unpleasant way. There’s a flare of pain down his left hand side that comes and goes unpredictably. He tries to soak it out with hot baths but nothing works. He can’t even reach it with an ice pack on his own. He really wants a drink. 

He’s miserable, a bear with a sore paw. Roy and Sarah move around each other in the house, fixing dinner and straightening up and smiling at each other, talking calmly about whatever comes into their heads just like he showed them how, and he can’t bear it. He wants to shout, to knock something over. To shoot someone again. When he’d hit the trooper the sick truth is that the sound of the bullet carving a furrow into the vest sounded good. He’d felt the recoil in his arms and shoulders and that had felt good too. He wants to hit someone. 

That night at dinner he keeps his head down. Roy made beef stew and it’s probably good but he feels hollowed out inside, like tastes and smells and colours are something that happen to other people. 

Sarah gets up to clear the plates but instead of sitting down again or starting the dishes he feels her hands on his shoulders behind him. He tenses and pain shoots down from his shoulder blade again and he almost snarls. She isn't rubbing his shoulders, she’s just soothing him in long strokes like you would an animal, hushing him and drawing her hands down his back. He’s wearing a sleeveless undershirt, worn out and a little baggy, and he doesn't care any more what’s happening. He hasn't had hands on him for months now and he’s greedy for it after weeks of showing them how it’s done, of having the luxury of touching them and then having to give it up. He hangs his head down low and lets her in, and as she start going over him in earnest he doesn't try to stop the noises he knows he’s making. She’s digging her fingers so hard into the muscle that it feels like she’s inside him, like she can see inside to the workings of him and figure out what’s wrong. The knot in his back feels worse, and worse, and just when it feels like he can’t stand it any longer she digs in hard with her knuckles all at once and he actually feels it dissolve. The pain’s all gone and instead there’s a trail of warmth in its path, and he imagines for a moment that he’s like Alton, that his innards have been brought to the surface for everyone to see and he’s glowing from the inside out. 

Sarah just keeps touching him, stroking up the back of his neck in tiny increments and kneading gently into the base of his skull until he could cry out with the pleasure of it. 

When he raises his head Roy is looking at him from across the table. Lucas has tears in his eyes and he’s achingly hard and he doesn't know what he’s feeling but whatever it is he can tell it’s laid out all over his face for anyone to see. 

Sarah kisses him. It’s not anything like before. She’s still got her fingers threaded through his hair, but now she uses them to tilt his face up to hers, to draw herself down to his mouth. It feels like a drink of cool water on a hot day. It feels like being saved. 

When she draws back, she’s smiling. Her eye teeth are a little crooked, he realises. He loves them. 

From across the table, Roy says ‘Do that again.’ His voice is low, roughened, but his eyes are steady. He’s talking to Sarah but he’s looking at Lucas. 

She tugs him to his feet this time. Better angle, thinks Lucas dimly, and then he can’t think at all. When he comes back to himself he finds he has Sarah hauled up to him almost off her feet, and Roy is standing at his back. He registers hot breath on his neck, the warm smell of motor oil and the sharp smell of earth that was always Roy. There’s a hand low down on his belly, slipped under his shirt. 

‘Do you even know what you’re doing to us?’ he asks in Lucas’s ear. His voice is reduced to a low growl, nothing like the boy that Lucas knew. ‘Do you even know what you look like, touching her?’

Lips on his neck, brief and with a hint of teeth, and then Roy has veered off and is kissing Sarah himself, not gently. Suddenly Lucas can see what drove them to each other a decade ago, a spark of whatever strange power brought Alton to them. 

Roy touches his neck afterwards, where the chain is just visible above his shirt collar. ‘You still wear this, huh?’ he says, and his voice is impossibly tender. Sarah says ‘I can taste both of you.’ Lucas hasn't loosened his hold on her and she has to feel how hard he is, has been since the first moment she touched his skin. He’d feel embarrassed if she wasn't breathing a little fast and flushed all over, if he couldn't feel Roy up against the small of his own back.

‘What do you want?’ asks Sarah. Lucas feels a little light headed. Roy’s hand has slipped lower and Sarah is still hard up against him and a few more minutes of whatever this is and he’ll be rubbing off against them like a teenager. He swallows. ‘I wanted something for you both’ he said. ‘You lost Alton. I wanted there to be something else for you both.’ 

‘This is something else’ said Roy, and he kisses Lucas’s neck again like he can’t help himself, slow and luxurious. ‘This OK?’ 

Lucas tries to focus against the feeling of them both against him. He manages to bend his head to Sarah, to twist back to find Roy’s lips. ‘If this is what you need’ he says. 

‘This is what we want’ says Sarah, and suddenly it’s easier for Lucas to say ‘Me too. For months, I think, I didn't know-’

‘So you weren't working in the yard with your shirt off on purpose?’ she asks, and it’s enough to startle a laugh out of him, to feel Roy’s answering quiver behind him. He’s never seen her smile so wide. ‘Come on’ says Roy, and Sarah’s steering them down the hallway to her room. He’s never been in here before, he realises. It’s just one more thing that’s brand new today. 

&&&

Afterwards, hours later, they sit out on the porch steps together. The sun isn't up yet but Roy is warm against him and Sarah is tucked against his other side. Sarah and Roy’s eyes are steady on the horizon and Lucas wonders if they’re thinking of Alton, of leaving him behind all those hundreds of miles away to the east. Lucas’s own eyes are on the lightening sky. Florida’s a long way away but the Other Place covers the whole world, and there are bridges connecting everything. Alton doesn't feel so far away just now. 

The sun is coming up now and Sarah and Roy are turned towards it like flowers. They don’t seem to need to squint against it like he does. Lucas presses a kiss to Roy’s neck, against Sarah’s hair. He sees the faint silver flashes in their eyes, but he’s not afraid. He feels himself rooted to the ground beneath him, connected to everything. He is the bridge between them, he realises, their bridge to the earth and up again to the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I am a Brit, and in writing this fic I became aware of just how many aspects of the US I am entirely ignorant of, including but not limited to the Federal penitential system, the college system, the training requirements of Texas State Troopers and the typical building materials of the south-western states. This isn't beta'd so I can say with confidence that all mistakes are very much my own. Feel free to call me out in the comments.


End file.
